The Skinny on Oils

Some days I have a hard time including enough good oils to keep my liver happy. Those usually coincide with the days that I’m grazing in the kitchen — gee, do I think they might be linked?

Carbohydrates keep you going for the first two hours after you eat.

After that it’s up to the fats and oils to provide the energy.

If I didn’t get enough oils with my breakfast, despite an adequate calorie intake, I’ll be hungry just a couple of hours later. But if I eat more, I’ll gain weight because I didn’t need more calories, I needed more oils with my breakfast.

When you have enough oils with your meals, you need less other foods. Oils have a lot of calories, but they are needed for health. And you especially need good oils to lose weight safely.

I try to keep 3-4 different high-quality; cold-pressed oils on hand: coconut, olive, sesame, and avocado.
 I don’t cook many of my foods, but when I do I use butter and the coconut and sesame oils because they have higher heat tolerance and don’t turn into life-sucking bad oils when heated to a reasonable cooking temperature.

I make marinades or salad dressing with the olive and avocado oils, or add olive oil to other foods.

All foods have some oils in them already.

Sprouts are already balanced with about 30% oils, 30% protein, and 40% carbohydrates. Avocados and olives are rich sources of good oils. So are many nuts and seeds, and some fish.

However, if you cook your food you are changing good oils to bad oils, so you’ll need more good oils from other sources to compensate. Avocados and olives help.

Lindsay Naturals canned olives are at Publix in my part of the country — I prefer the green ripe ones, my daughter prefers the black ripe ones. Neither of them are “green” in the usual sense, they just have slightly different flavors. Try a can of each and see which ones you like.

Avoid Canola, corn, and “vegetable” oils.

Corn is not an oily food like olives or avocados are. Neither are most vegetables. So how do they make corn oil or vegetable oil? They use solvents: propolene glycol, alcohol, and other solvents that end with “ol” are used to convert the sugars to fats. And how do they get these solvents out of the oils afterwards? They don’t.

Your body doesn’t know what to do with these solvents so they float around like free radicals. Oils that come through corn oil production — hydrolyzing corn to create a fat that doesn’t exist in nature — are not good oils for your body.

The Good Oils

Coconut oil is touted as being far superior to other oils but I haven’t found it to be so and neither has Dr. Max. Olive oil just seems to make our bodies happier. Sometimes a greener olive oil is better, sometimes a yellow olive oil is better. But olive oil is the least expensive good oil out there and very few people have problems with it unless you buy the cheapest of the cheap. Or if it smells bad — oils go rancid and rancid oils are really bad for you!

I used to rotate between several brands of olive oil but finally settled on Pompeian – it consistently works well for me. Publix frequently puts it on the buy-one-get-one-free sale.